Walden

Henry David Thoreau

Brute Neighbors and House-Warming

Spring and Conclusion

Summary: Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors

Thoreau spends many winter evenings alone beside his fire,
while the snow whirls violently outside his house. He is able to
dig a path to town through the deep snow, but has few visitors to
his neck of the woods in this cold season. Alone in the wilderness,
Thoreau finds himself compelled to conjure up images of those who
had endured the hard Walden winters before him.

Although the route between Concord and Lincoln is sparsely populated,
Thoreau believes it had been settled more thickly earlier in the
century. Many of the earlier inhabitants had been blacks: Thoreau
summons up images of Cato Ingraham, the spinster Zilpha, Brister
Freeman and his wife, Fenda. Some of their abodes have almost completely
vanished, destroyed by age or fire. Thoreau recalls how Breed’s
hut burned to the ground in a fire twelve years before. Thoreau
and the local fire brigade had rushed out to save it, but had found
it too far gone. Thoreau recalls seeing the heir to the house lying
in shock, muttering to himself about the loss of his property. Near
Lincoln, a potter named Wyman had once squatted, followed by his
descendants. Another memorable recent inhabitant of the woods was
an Irishman named Hugh Quoil, formerly a soldier at the Battle of
Waterloo, who had come to live at the Wyman place. All these old-timers
are now gone, and Thoreau lives alone amid the ravaged foundations
and empty cellar holes that once marked their homes. The site of
a once burgeoning village is, by Thoreau’s time, marked only by
decay, and by grasses and lilacs planted in more prosperous times
and outliving their planters. Thoreau muses on the insignificance
and transience of humankind’s place in nature.

Thoreau has sparse contact with other humans in the depths
of winter, and even animals keep to themselves at times. Among Thoreau’s
most reliable companions are the barred owl, an occasional woodchopper,
and his friends William Ellery Channing and the philosopher Amos
Bronson Alcott. Thoreau’s mentor and benefactor, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
also comes. None of these men is directly named in the text, however.
Emerson is identified as the “Old Immortal.” Thoreau keeps regular
watch for “the Visitor who never comes,” conforming to an ancient
Hindu law of hospitality.

Summary: Winter Animals

Walking over a frozen pond, Thoreau finds everything more
open and spacious, with wide yards for sliding and skating on the
frozen surface. On these days, the air is filled with the call of
the hoot owl and the cry of the goose resounding through the woods.
In the morning the red squirrels scuttle and scavenge, at dusk the
rabbits come for their feedings, and on moonlit nights the foxes
search the snow for prey. Such sounds come and go, but the sounds
of snow falling and ice cracking continue through the day and the
night. Thoreau places the harvest’s unripe corn at his doorstep,
attracting smaller squirrels and rabbits to feed near his dwelling.
Sometimes he sits and watches the little creatures paw at their
food for hours. At other times they carry their bounty away into
the forest, discarding their refuse in various spots. This refuse
attracts the jays, chickadees, and sparrows that descend upon the
leftover cobs and pick at them. On certain mornings and afternoons,
Thoreau hears hounds yelping in pursuit of their quarry. Thoreau
often talks with the huntsmen who pass by Walden.

Summary: The Pond in Winter

Thoreau’s first task on waking up is to collect water
for the day. In the winter this job proves difficult, as he has
to chop through the ice. He is soon joined by a hardy group of fisherman.
Thoreau is amused by their primitive methods, but is more amazed
by what they catch, notably the distinctively colored pickerel,
which stands out from the more typically celebrated cod and haddock
of the sea.

In an effort to measure the depth of Walden Pond and
dispel the myth that it is bottomless, Thoreau uses a fishing line
and a light stone. Many locals believe the pond to be bottomless,
but Thoreau measures it at just over one hundred feet. Thoreau meditates
on the way people wish to believe in a symbol of heaven and infinity. Through
repeated soundings, Thoreau is able to get a general sense of the
shape of Walden Pond’s bottom, and learns that it conforms to the
surrounding terrain. The pond reaches its greatest depth at the
point of its greatest length and breadth. Thoreau wonders if this might
be a clue to pinpointing the deepest points of larger bodies of water,
such as oceans. To test this hypothesis, Thoreau plumbs the nearby
White Pond. Again, the point of greatest depth is quite near to
the point where the axis of greatest length intersects the axis
of greatest breadth. Having more evidence to bolster his theory,
Thoreau extends it to a metaphorical level, supposing that a person’s behavior
and circumstances will determine the depths of his or her soul.

In Thoreau’s second winter at the pond, a team of one
hundred men and more arrives at Walden Pond. Acting as agents for
an ambitious farmer, these workmen cut and cut at the ice over a
period of two weeks, claiming they could harvest as much as a thousand
tons on a good day and ten thousand tons over the whole winter.
It is a complex business, on a grand scale, and the result is a
great heap of ice to be stored and later sold for a profit. Although
some of it reaches far-off destinations, Thoreau notes that the
greater part of it melts and returns to the pond.

Analysis: Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors, Winter
Animals, and The Pond in Winter

These three chapters are dominated by winter, a time for
stepping back from outside work and withdrawing to the inner world
of home and mind. As a result, this portion of Walden is
brooding and highly meditative, focusing on ideas of absence, history,
and infinity. “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors “ is a survey
of Walden’s ghosts, or at least of earlier residents of the pond
who are “conjured up,” as Thoreau says, in his own mind. Prominent
among the dead he conjures up from the graves of history are black
people: Cato Ingraham, Zilpha, and Brister Freeman are all poor
blacks who are alive no longer, but still live in Thoreau’s personal
memory. Given Thoreau’s strong opposition to Southern slavery and
his proven commitment to aiding fugitive slaves, his reminiscences
of black people here take on an ideological importance. We sense
that Thoreau is recalling them because the nation’s official chronicles
do not: in a generally racist country, individuals must provide
a humane commemoration for those who are otherwise overlooked and
forgotten.

The absent black people segue in Thoreau’s imagination
to another absence: that of the hut that had once belonged to Breed before
it burned down a dozen years earlier. This story of a mere house
takes on a symbolic meaning. As Thoreau narrates the story of how
he and the other local fire volunteer firefighters rushed to save
the hut, only to decide “to let it burn, it was so far gone and
so worthless,” our thoughts turn to the inevitable end to all things, houses
and people alike. The moral is that it is useless to struggle to preserve
them, for destruction will come regardless of our efforts. Thoreau
says of the deceased Irishman, Hugh Quoil, that “[a]ll I know of
him is tragic,” and the same could be said of almost everything
he mentions in these wintry and death-obsessed chapters. His focus
on the mortality of all life has a biblical feeling, as in the theme of memento
mori (Latin for “remember you shall die”) common in New
England Protestant sermons and prayer books. When Thoreau mentions
scripture in this chapter, his words sound even more religious.
The theological opposite of all this mortality is, of course, immortal
heaven. Thoreau again equates heaven on earth with water, like that
of Walden Pond or Breed’s well, “which, thank Heaven, could never
be burned.” Water is the only thing impervious to the fires of death,
and so there are spots of immortality even amid these ruins of destruction.
When Thoreau later dubs his occasional visitor Emerson an “Old Immortal,”
we feel that philosophy is another such spot, and that the water’s
eternity is connected to the eternal truths glimpsed by great minds.

The idea of eternity is deeply sounded in the chapter
“The Pond in Winter,” which focuses on the question of whether Walden
Pond is, as people rumor it to be, infinite. Thoreau is determined
to measure its depths, just as he reaches into the depths of himself
in his backwoods retirement. The newly fallen snow makes the pond
hard to locate, and the result is suggestive: the purity within
us could be anywhere, if we can pierce the surface of our earthly
lives. When Thoreau finds Walden Pond, cuts through the icy layer
on top, and gazes into the “perennial waveless serenity” within,
his conclusions are theological rather than natural, or both at
once. “Heaven,” he says, “is under our feet as well as over our
heads.” Thoreau seems satisfied that the pond should be seen as
a bottomless quantity of water descending all the way to the other
side of the globe, since it encourages inspirational thoughts of
infinity.

We might infer that some men, like Thoreau, do not need
symbols of infinity, since they experience infinity directly: the
infinity of man’s spirit. Thoreau is content to prove that Walden
Pond is only a hundred feet deep, since he knows that real depth
is elsewhere, in his own mind and soul. Thoreau compares ice and
water to the intellect and the emotions respectively, thus depicting
the entire human spirit as composed of different aqueous states:
the human is water. He sees a reflection of himself
in the cut ice, “a double shadow of myself,” mirrored in the water.
Thus every time he goes for a drink of water, he communes with the
timeless aspect of his own self. Water becomes a metaphor not just
for heaven but also, more important, for the human soul that is
itself heavenly, for the divine side of humankind. This divinity
can never be depleted, as Thoreau hints in his detailed account
of ice cutting, which in the winter of 1846 yields
ten thousand tons—most of which melts and flows back ultimately
to the pond again, so that “the pond recovered the greater part.”
It is the living source, inexhaustible.

The answer to question 2 accurately notes that "Thoreau is no true socialist," but fails to flesh out the primary foundation to support the statement. Socialism is a political force that is firmly rooted in collectivism where the mob (i.e. "society") uses the force of gov't to impose its will on the individuals in the minority. Thoreau clearly abhorred such vile abuse of power. He was a staunch individualist whose actions and writings were universally and diametrically opposed to use of force by the state to impose on people he understood we... Read more→